Upshot
by webofdreams89
Summary: The plan, everything it wrought, and the people it broke.


A/N: So this was depressing to write. I just rewatched YJ: Invasion and just had a lot of built up feelings. This is the result. Its also posted over at Ao3 under my same name.

Upshot

Summary: The plan, everything it wrought, and the people it broke. Told from Barbara, Kaldur, Artemis, M'gann, Wally, and Dick's perspectives. Rated T.

Warnings: canon character death, dark themes.

* * *

Barbara knew it wasn't because Dick didn't trust her.

Because he did, and proved his faith in her every time they worked together on a mission, every time they'd gone from doing homework in the den of Wayne Manor down to the batcave to change for a night of patrol.

She knew he had his reasons, and Barbara, in turn, trusted them.

He was her best friend and she was sure that he always will be, but it would still take a long time to get over the sting of what felt very close to being a betrayal.

Especially when she knew she'd be the one left behind to pick up the pieces for Dick, just as she had since they were kids suiting up for the first time.

* * *

After they labored for weeks over the mission, hammering and shaping every detail they could come up with and solutions for every worst case scenario, Kaldur went around his apartment, gathering the most important things he possessed. When he was finished, he pulled out every keepsake, every photograph, and examined them with a something filling him like fleeting panic.

He didn't know when he would see any of these things again, the small birthday gifts from his teammates, the letters from his mother, a seashell necklace Tula gave him when they were only children. His long, webbed fingers caressed each memento as if they were fine and tenuous, and in a way, they were.

But they were just things, Kaldur knew that. They were just things and it would be the people these keepsakes were associated with that Kaldur would really miss, but still, he filled the box and gave it to Dick to hold on to until, _if_, he came back.

Sometimes, when it got especially hard and it almost felt as if his father loved him and this was his life, Kaldur thought back to that afternoon in his apartment and what all of those things meant to him to reassure himself what he was doing this for.

* * *

Artemis noticed, as the days and the weeks passed, it got harder and harder to look into the mirror. Before, when she had a life, her own life, Artemis would glance in the mirror all the time.

It had nothing to do with vanity, not really, just a simple self-reassurance while she brushed her teeth or her hair stemming from her childhood when she would gaze at herself and wonder if people could see her family etched into her features. Her criminal father's golden hair, her imprisoned mother's dark almond eyes, her sister's teasing smirk. For so long those features haunted her and she wished she could just wake up and look like one of the other girls at school, someone without a sordid past and mutable history.

But now, Artemis would give almost anything to see her mom and her dad and Jade grinning back at her in the mirror. Because it would be her and not this outlandish stranger she was terrified she was actually becoming.

* * *

It became second nature, fracturing a mind to get what she wanted. It was selfish, M'gann knew it was, but it was also just so easy that she never even thought about it anymore.

Really, after what happened with Conner, she should have known how far she was straying from the team's founding principles, but even that, the loss of the person who had mattered most, just wasn't enough. She hurt Conner, but other than that, he was fine, recuperating.

But when M'gann saw Kaldur, knowing what he'd done to Artemis, the rage that seized her was unlike anything else she'd ever felt, and M'gann had always been a creature running off of pure emotion. It was like a spark within her, fanned by the cold look in Kaldur's eyes that finally convinced M'gann that Dick was right, that Kaldur really was a traitor and a murderer and she couldn't see past the hurt he had inflicted upon her by killing her best friend and Earth sister.

So she broke him. And it had been so simple, a crack in the dam before all the pressure built and the water broke free.

As the pieces settled and the truth hit M'gann like bullet to the chest and she saw Artemis standing there with Kaldur in her arms, M'gann felt something snap inside her too and wondered what someone did after shattering.

* * *

Wally didn't even question. Uncle Barry and Bart weren't quite enough, they needed more velocity, so Wally was gone, taking the zeta tube and running the rest of the way to the Arctic without a word.

Then, he was just running, letting every thought go and just _feeling,_ thriving on it, using it to push him further, farther, faster. Of course, he was being lapped but it didn't really irk him as it usually did because something was different this time, Wally could feel it. It took him a moment to realize why, Barry screaming in his ear, as he looked down at his hands.

It was an odd feeling, disappearing.

* * *

He hadn't meant for it to turn out this way. He hadn't meant for his friends to hurt and suffer and die and he hadn't meant to become some sort of half person that felt…just wrong, untrue, insincere, like he lost himself somewhere along the way and dragged all his friends to this hell with him.

And in the end, Dick asked himself, was it all worth it?

Well, it saved the world. Wally would have liked that.


End file.
